The Misremembered Man (11 page)

The interval arrived and Declan gave Jamie the nod.

Jamie, his faculties sufficiently impaired by booze to mimic courage, was ready for it. He hoisted his Horner two-row Irish button accordion onto his front and climbed up on the stool. The crowd roared approval, sweaty hands on sticky glasses raised in a toast.

“Give her a good squeeze, Jamie!” someone shouted. “Aye, ye boy ye!”

And in seconds Jamie was away, “The Boston Burglar” roaring out in great torrents from the wheezing bellows.

Up there on the high stool, Jamie sat in a shaft of white light, brandishing the instrument like a warrior’s silvery battle shield, his fingers dancing over the buttons, the room drenched in its rich droning sound. He played with his head cocked to one side, the sweat flying off him and his eyes shut against the smoke, the glare, and the undivided attention of his audience. Nothing could compare to the joy that Jamie felt in those moments in the hot room, with the eyes of seventy people upon him, their tapping feet, their clapping hands—and
he
the push, the pull and the absolute focus of it all.

He slid effortlessly from number to number in the first of his three set pieces. Half an hour’s break for Declan and the Bullets was half an hour’s glory for him. However, he’d just finished “The Black Velvet Band” and was bathing in a wave of applause when a shout went up. He recognized the voice of Chuck Sproule.

“Hi, what’s the difference between Jamie McCloone and a bucket of shite?”

Seventy guffaws escaped from seventy throats.

An answer flew from the back of the room and struck Jamie’s ears with a vulgar force. It was young Sproule again.

“A bucket!” he yelled, and the crowd stormed with laughter.

Jamie, a rage rising in him like milk boiling up in a saucepan, decided, with a powerful self-restraint, to ignore the insult this time. He took a quick swig of Black Bush, slid the seething saucepan off the heat and began belting out “I’ll Tell Me Ma” before the wee bastard had time to fling up another heckle.

The powerful, throbbing music swelled in the room as Jamie played on and on, afraid to stop in case Sproule got the chance to hit him with another broadside of abuse. Soon, however, a metallic flash in the doorway told him that Declan and the Bullets were back; his time was nearly up. Jamie finished off “Danny Boy”, drawing out a deafening refrain. The crowd roared its appreciation as he vacated the bar stool and unstrapped the accordion. Then, in the murmuring lull, it came again.

“Hey, Jamie! How d’you keep an idiot in suspense?”

The hubbub lessened; the rowdier patrons sniggered in expectation. Jamie heaved off his instrument and thrust it into Paddy’s hands.

“Take a hoult of that for one wee minute, Paddy,” he said.

The accordion squawked like a fat infant as Paddy bundled the bellows in. When he looked up again it was to see Jamie head in the direction of the taunting voice, his hatred coming to a blaze under the most recent splash of vitriolic fuel. His accordion’s music was his only way of releasing the gift he had to give. He’d been stepped on as a child but, by God, no adult was going to step on the man he strove to be.

“God, we better go after him!” cried Matty.

In a flash both men were on their feet, hauling Jamie back with an uncharacteristic swiftness.

“How d’you keep an idiot in suspense?” the shrill voice repeated. “I’ll tell ye the day after the morra, Jamie!”

The crowd fell about again. Jamie freed himself with a frenzied force, elbowing his two comrades in the stomach, and in seconds he was up on young Chuck, sending the glasses and bottles flying in a glittering crash as the table was overturned. He yanked him free of his mates—none of whom was sober enough to assist—punched Chuck on the nose, doubled him up with a kick in the privates, then tore at his greasy hair, hauling him upright.

“What was that ye said, ye dirty wee bastard?” he spat. “Not so funny now, are ye?”

The crowd cheered. But Chuck shot out a fist and got Jamie smack in the belly. He fell onto his back, his arms and legs paddling the air like a capsized turtle.

Then suddenly all went quiet in the room. Jamie opened his eyes, to see Peggy the Bacon-Slicer advancing on them, her furious face set in a terrible contortion.

“Jamie McCloone, you should be ashamed of yourself! No more drink for you.” She turned on Chuck, who was holding a bloody nose. “As for you: out this minute! I don’t want my carpet ruined. And you’re barred for a month.”

“He hit me first!” Chuck wailed.

“Aye, and you insulted him first. You’re nothing but a useless eejit.”

And with that she led him by the ear up the floor, like a matador parading a wounded bull, as the crowd applauded. On approaching the open door, Chuck, knowing his case would not be heard, started to shout and resist, holding unto the door frame in desperation, his feet sliding all over the place in a ludicrous parody of an astronaut’s moon walk.

“You’re nothing but a fuckin’ oul’ bitch!” he cried, in a voice gritty with resentment, “and you’ve a face on you like a sow’s arse.”

“That’s it, you’re barred for
three
months now!” Peggy slapped him hard across the face.

Slope came from behind, planted a foot against Chuck’s skinny back and heeled him out onto the street, swiftly double-locking the door behind him.

With the troublemaker well on his way, things returned to normal. Matty and Paddy helped their friend to his feet and Jamie struggled back to his seat by the podium, all too aware that his comb-over had come unstuck during the fray and that he must look a frightful sight. He attempted to rearrange his hair while apologizing to his mates.

“Och now, we know how much you wanted to get at the brute,” said Paddy.

“Sure I would a done the same meself,” agreed Matty, and he placed his own double brandy before Jamie to help him recover himself.

Jamie swallowed a mouthful. An otherwise grand night had been destroyed and he nearly wept at the recollection of it. How great it had all gone—and how quickly it had all been taken away by that filthy-mouthed wee get.

“That was a great bit a playin’, Jamie,” said Paddy, trying to salvage something from the wreckage.

“Aye, if it hadn’t been for that rascal shoutin’ at ye and then you havin’ to get up and hit him a clout, it woulda been a grand night altogether,” Matty put in, grabbing Paddy’s precious piece of solace and tossing it back on the raging sea.

Declan Colt, observing the trio from the stage, and sensing Jamie’s dejection, shimmered up to the mike.

“Now listen up!” he ordered the room. “I want y’all to give Jamie here a big hand. Some of the best playin’ I ever did hear came from that accordjin tonight.”

The crowd stood and applauded, and Jamie’s face broke into a great smile as he held up his brandy glass in toast. He saw again his uncle take his awkward, twelve-year-old fingers and extend them over the ivory buttons, felt again the surging joy when he realized he could make the instrument speak another language from his tortured, silent self. The triumphant result of that entire endeavor was James McCloone, the man, sitting on a high stool in O’Shea’s bar, making hands clap and voices sing as he fed his sonorous, furious music to the room.

On seeing the cheering crowd, Jamie, for now at least, knew that he mattered, that the people of Tailorstown were behind him four-square. But he feared that the elation was fleeting and that later the nasty episode with Sproule would come back to haunt him.

L
ydia read over Frank McPrunty’s letter once again in the relative privacy of her bedroom. She stood with her back against the locked door, just in case. She would be meeting him in two hours’ time and needed to acquaint herself once more with his personal details.

Lydia, being a teacher, approached most things in life in an analytical manner. Frank McPrunty was a project, and his letter an examination paper. It needed revision before she set the test and decided whether his performance merited a pass or a fail.

Lydia folded the letter and returned it to her purse, satisfied that she knew what she was dealing with. She had decided to answer Mr. McPrunty first, because, of the two respondents, he seemed slightly more interesting and more in tune with her on an intellectual level. She was keeping Mr. McCloone, the farmer, in reserve for the time being, in the eventuality that Frank proved unsuitable.

She took a final look at herself in the mirror and was pleased that she cut such an elegant figure. The pink juliet dress with the white butterfly collar was, she felt, a good choice: appealing in an understated kind of way.

She checked her watch. In twenty minutes she would collect Daphne at the library. Her friend had agreed to accompany her for moral support.

“Well of course I’ll come with you, dear!” Daphne had assured her. “I couldn’t have you getting carried off by some mysterious stranger and never seeing you again.”

Lydia smiled at the memory as she slung a white cardigan over her shoulders. She picked up her bag and a library book and left the room. The book was a decoy.

“I’m just popping along to the library to see Daphne, Mother.” Lydia tried to sound as upbeat and natural as possible. “Do you need your books changed?”

Elizabeth Devine was in the parlor, her embroidery frame on her lap, a cup of tea at her elbow and the television before her showing a mute Fanny Craddock rolling out a sheet of pastry. She continued to gaze at Fanny, totally ignoring Lydia.

“I can’t stand that woman’s voice! Sounds as if she’s chewing gravel. And why does she need to talk so much anyway? We can all see what she’s doing. We’re not imbeciles.”

Lydia waited for her mother to finish and tried again.

“Mother, do you need your books changed?” She held up her Victoria Holt.

“And that husband of hers is an idiot. Look at him!” Johnny Craddock had just heaved into view, with a cake tin in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.

“What way is that to dress when you’re baking—a blazer and cravat? You’d think he was at the races. What happened to aprons, I wonder.”

Lydia saw Johnny’s blazer and cravat as an augury of imminent significance. She remembered Frank Xavier McPrunty’s description of the attire he’d be wearing: “navy blazer, gray slacks, a white shirt and red cravat.” As she looked at Johnny Craddock’s bald head and bemonocled eye, a feeling of dread overtook her. Better to discover the truth as soon as possible, she thought.

“Mother—”

“Yes, I know: the books. I’m not finished with the Cookson, but you can take back that other piece of filth.” She pointed at a book on the windowsill. “I’m not allowing Jean Plaidy back into this house. She had a woman taking her top off in front of a man. I’d never read such smut. You tell that friend of yours to put her under the counter, or better still in the dustbin, where she belongs.”

Lydia picked up the item of “pornography,” bent and kissed her mother goodbye as the credits for Fanny Craddock rolled.

“Why are you wearing so much scent?” Mrs. Devine demanded. She looked Lydia up and down. “And those are your Sunday shoes.”

“Look, Mother, I’m going out.” She saw her mother’s eyes take on that all-too-familiar glint of suspicion. “To the library.”

“You’re up to something. Why are you wearing all that scent if you’re just going to see that friend of yours?” Elizabeth touched her daughter’s cheek. “And you’ve too much powder on your face. Yes, there’s a man somewhere. I can almost smell him.”

“Mother,” Lydia began, her voice edged with impatience, “I’m wearing all this scent for myself, d’you hear? And the face powder, shoes, and dress—all for me.” She splayed a hand on her chest and beat it several times to drive home the point. “For me, me,
me
! Not Daphne, not for any man or any woman for that matter. Just me, d’you hear?”

There was a silence. Elizabeth Devine was prepared to concede that she’d been well and truly rebuked, but still felt it necessary to throw another little poisoned dart as Lydia turned to go.

“Doesn’t matter what you say. You still look like a strumpet and if your father were here he wouldn’t let you out looking like that.”

“See you in a couple of hours. I’m getting my hair done as well.”

Lydia shouted all this over her shoulder as she made a beeline down the hallway. She had invented the hair appointment, knowing that her mother would strongly object to not having been informed earlier of something so important. Hair appointments were Elizabeth’s territory.

And sure enough, as Lydia pulled the door shut, she caught the first part of her mother’s objection.

“You never said anything about a—”

But Lydia was gone, and freedom beckoned.

The parking lot at the Chestnut Inn Hotel was reassuringly vacant when Lydia and Daphne pulled in. They counted only five cars.

“No wedding to contend with, it seems,” Lydia said, cutting the engine and looking in the rearview mirror. “Thank heavens for that. I couldn’t stand it if there were gaggles of people roaming round.”

“What a lovely place,” Daphne said, looking up at the white Georgian façade. “Have you been here before? God, it looks terribly posh. This Frank person has expensive tastes, I’ll give him that.”

But Lydia was barely listening. As her eyes swept over the clipped lawns and hedges, she was contemplating the nature of what she was about to do. This act was a defining one.

“What?” she asked absentmindedly. Daphne was still giving forth. “Oh yes, it is rather grand, isn’t it?”

“Are you nervous?” Daphne gave her friend’s arm a gentle squeeze. “What a silly question. Of course you’re nervous. I’d be too.”

“Oh, I’m okay, but…” She hesitated. “What if he turns out to be an absolute ogre, Daphne?”

“Of course he won’t! Here, let me see his letter again.”

Lydia passed it over without a word. Her attention was elsewhere. She was staring ahead of her, at the heavy cedar doors with their inlaid glass panels, trying to focus on what she was about to do. Was she insane?

She had never done anything rash in her life. From an early age her father had instilled in her a sense of duty and responsibility. Any venture must be mulled over and planned, viewed from all angles and weighed with the utmost consideration; that way, the outcome one expected was all but guaranteed. That way, life held no unpleasant surprises. Disappointment lay in careless thinking and an incautious attitude. And happiness? There was no such state, in her father’s estimation. The trials of life must be borne with a stout faith and fortitude. The reward was the happiness of eternal life in the heavenly realms.

Lydia steeled herself against the thought of the Reverend Perseus Cuthbert gazing down on her now—as he surely must be—from those same heavenly realms. If he were alive, he would most certainly be lecturing her on the weakness of the flesh and the dangers of rash adventuring. But he wasn’t alive, she reminded herself. He was dead and she was free.

“He doesn’t seem like an ogre to me,” said Daphne, interrupting her reverie. She folded the letter. “In fact he seems like a very nice gentleman.”

“What?”
she almost shouted, believing for a confused moment that Daphne was referring to her father. Daphne looked at her strangely. “Oh, Frank. Yes, of course. Good. Shall we go in then?”

“We should. The longer we sit here, the longer you’ll worry, and that’s not good.”

“Do I look all right?” Lydia snapped open her Max Factor compact and checked herself.

“You look lovely,” Daphne lied. She could see that her friend had applied too much powder to her nose. It looked as though it had been dipped in a bag of Early Riser flour. “And the pink really suits your coloring.”

Lydia stowed the compact and shut the purse. “Thank you, Daphne. What would I do without you, dear?”

Daphne set her face in a determined smile. They left the car and strode purposefully toward the hotel entrance.

A brass arrow and carpeted steps beyond the lobby guided them down to the place of rendezvous. They descended and found themselves facing the lounge doors. Lydia grabbed Daphne’s arm.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Let’s see if I can pick him out from here.”

She opened the stained-glass doors a crack and peeked in, unobtrusively scanning the lounge interior for man-with-camera.

There was a couple at one table having a drink: a woman with a beehive hairdo and a man who looked half her age; at another table a young family was having a late lunch. A youth seated at the bar was staring fixedly up at a football game being shown on a suspended television set.

Where was he? Perhaps he hadn’t arrived yet. She was about to venture in when her eye fell on a solitary figure seated by the window, looking out in what seemed like expectation.

Her heart sank.

The camera and glass of Fanta soda before him confirmed her worst fears. He was small and totally bald, with a turtle-like neck rising out of an extravagant, mulberry-red cravat. If she still had doubts, then his navy blazer with outsize shoulder pads, buttoned brassily over his front, and his gray slacks, so accurately described in the letter, verified his identity. Mr. McPrunty had come to life painfully before her eyes.

Sixty-one? He looked closer to
eighty
-one. She absorbed the scene in a few heart-stopping moments. She wanted to flee.

Daphne, sensing her disappointment, caught her arm.

“What is it, Lydia? Have you seen him?”

Lydia could not speak and simply pointed.

“Is that him?” Daphne asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Lydia said in a desperate whisper. “Of
course
I’m sure. There’s the camera he spoke about, and he’s wearing exactly what he described in the letter.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, I can’t meet him, Daphne! I just can’t. He’s an old-age pensioner. He could be my
grandfather
.”

“Now, Lydia, come into the ladies and we’ll discuss this. You just can’t leave him there like that. It wouldn’t be right.”

She yanked Lydia back out through the door, and found the bathroom a little way to the right of the lounge entrance. She nudged the door shut.

“Now look, you must go and meet him. It’s only proper. It would be very rude to let him down after all this.”

They stood in the faux-marble enclosure under the thrum of a strip light. Lydia looked undecided. Then she went to the mirror, held her face in her hands and peered into the smoked glass.

“Yes, and I suppose it’s not very rude of him to lie to me that he’s sixty-one when he looks like Methuselah? Oh my God,” she asked the mirror, “how did I get here?”

Daphne tried to console. “Look Lydia, it’s only a meeting. And he can’t be that bad.” She addressed her friend’s reflection. “Looks,” she said, “aren’t everything, you know.” Lydia glared and Daphne realized her error.